Week 6 - Pick a Path Stories

We have extended our narrative writing over the past two weeks to create pick a path stories.  This is where we have the traditional problem in a narrative story, but the audience gets the choice of two possible solutions.

To start with we had to sequence our ideas in a plan.  Here is an example of a completed plan from Dorothy.  This was a really visual way to organise our ideas.

From this we have worked on using google slides to create the pick a path options. We used a template that Mr Riceman made on our site.  It had a few errors in it which we found as we made links inside and we had to fix them up as we went.  Lily has almost got her story finished (just a few editing touches to go) and here it is below.

 Over the next week we will be finishing and posting these on our individual blogs.  Please investigate these further and give us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.  We really appreciate it!

Week 2 - Creative Character Writing

Hi fellow bloggers,

Last week Room 8 were working on character descriptions.  On Monday we went to the site build your wild self and we got to create a character that was half human, half animal (or whatever we chose).  Then we created a y-chart each, that had our character and the main features of their looks, actions and personalities.  I have included this below for you to have a look at.  This is the creature that we created with Mr Riceman our teacher.  If you would like to find out about more of our characters please check out our individual blogs on the side of the page.

Here is the character description I created from this...

Mix-up (Room 8's shared writing)

Mix up has two green arms that stick out from the top of his body.  The four sucker fingers pads are extremely useful for him. Unusually, he has brown hair that is similar to a normal human.  Eight legs cover the bottom half of his body.  They are purple tentacles perfect for slithering up trees.  His buffalo snout is grey and brown, covered in coarse hair that helps him sniff his prey.  All in all, he is a very weird looking character!

The sticky finger pads help him with his favourite pass-time, climbing up walls and washing windows for a living.  The eight tentacles means he can manages 4 buckets and 4 brushes at the same time, while holding onto any smooth surface.  Once it hits 10:30, his snout twitches in search of the nearest long black coffee, he must get his fix!

Mix up is generous, he often donates his time to wash the windows of his local school, free of charge. There is a cheeky side to him.  Amongst his friends, he loves a practical joke and often plays tricks.  His friends also describe him as bookish, when not learning or causing trouble, his nose is buried firmly in the latest and most interesting work of Non fiction freshwater reading!

Ready, Set, Design Week 1 and 2

Our overall theme for the year this year is "Responsibility". This term we are going to be looking at designing and creating responsibly.  To start off the term we have been having a go at some "Ready, Set, Design" challenges.  These challenges involve creating something to solve a problem in a small group in a short time (if you would like more information please check out the you tube video below).

 

So far we have had three challenges in class.  Our first was something to protect an animal, our second was shelter for a class mate and our third was a virtual challenge using tinkercad to create something to keep Mr Riceman dry as he moves to his car with an armload of books and his precious laptop.  Check out the photos below for highlights from our designs.  If you would like further information please have a look at our individual blogs for some of our reflections.  These will be up later in the week.  We would love a positive, thoughtful and helpful comment below too.

A fitting end to Term One

At the end of Term One, Waikowhai Primary School held a special assembly to acknowledge ANZAC day. This is because it will happen while we are away from school on our school holiday break.

As you can see, the school hall was set up beautifully by Ms Sands.  A poppy garden was created at the front of the hall.  Children from each class came up to lay poppies in remembrance.  We displayed the crosses honouring fallen soldiers from our ANZAC centenary presentations two years ago at the front of the class.

A group of our Senior students helped by sharing a little bit of information about ANZAC day with younger members of our school community.  We also listened to the last post, observed a minute's silence and used our fabulous singing voices together as a special way to finish of the term.  We then finished the assembly as a syndicate while Ms Sands read us an ANZAC related picture book. You will be able to find this in the sophisticated picture book section of the library.

Room 8 focused on some ANZAC activities during the week.  One of the highlights was the creation of acrostic poems.  Below you can see the shared writing that Room 8 did before we went to create our own from the word bank below.

We would love to hear how you acknowledged ANZAC day.  Please leave us a positive, thoughtful or helpful comment in the comments section below.

Investigating Area - Proving ourselves right!

This term, we have been investigating measurement as part of our maths learning.  Earlier in the term we created paper planes and had a competition measuring the length that these could fly.  Over the past two weeks we have again combined our knowledge of flight and flying things to investigate another measurement concept, Area.

Firstly, we identified what we think area is. Our class definition is that 'area is how much it takes to cover something, or how much space to cover something".  Mr Riceman set up an investigation for us to measure how different areas can make different things happen.

We created plastic bag parachutes by recycling old materials. Any leftovers we disposed of responsibly using our soft plastics bin.  Our challenge was to make three parachutes, each with a different area.  We used a you-tube video to get a general idea about how we could build these.  Then, came our chance to create.  While creating, Mr Riceman introduced us to the concepts of variables and scientific testing.  We talked about testing one variable which was the area of the parachute.  To do this we had to keep all the other variables on the parachute as close to the same as we could (e.g. length of string, weight of teddy...)

Once we had made these we then had to test them out fairly. Our hypothesis (what we think will happen) was that a parachute with a larger area would take longer to get to the ground. This is because there is more area in the parachute to catch wind and slow it down.  We did at least three drops of each parachute from the same height and recorded how long it took for these to land.  Here are some videos of the testing phase.

Most of us proved our hypothesis correctly, the larger the area of the parachute, the longer it takes the teddy to land.  It was so much fun putting our ideas about area into real experiments and making something to prove what we thought.  Have you ever experimented with something like this?  We would love your feedback and to hear about any connections you might have to our learning.

How to SMRF?

One of our new challenges as we work digitally is making sure we are smart about where we store and share our files.  We have enjoyed working with James to create a flowchart that shows us the process of how we can get our learning activities from our syndicate site, make a copy of them and then organise them in our own google drives.

To do this, we call it SMRF(ing) a document.  This is to remind us what to do.

S=STOP
M=Make a copy
R=Rename the file
F=File it in our drive.

To make this process easier you will see below some flowchart examples from Room 8.
 Do you SMRF your documents too?  We would love some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback about how you do this.  To find out more, please check out our cybersmart page.

CyberSmart Week 1

Our CyberSmart teacher James come for his first visit back to Room8.

• We are learning to follow the Kawa of Care and use our device confidently and in clever ways.
• Smart learners know their Google ID and password.
• Know how to use their device confidently.

Week 8 - Chinese Language Week

Ni Hao,

As well as our usual learning we have acknowledged Chinese language week this week.  We have had a go at some different greetings and words that we could use each day.  There are six posters that have words we can used and you will see these displayed below with our Chinese Lanterns.

For reading, we followed a procedural text to create these Chinese Lantern with Miss McGrath.  You can find the instructions here if you would like to have a go at these too.

Monday Maths Madness

Our week started with a mathematical bang!  We spent our morning block immersed in a range of different math problems.  We split into groups across the senior syndicate and got our brains into gear while we tried to solve a variety of different problems.  Best of all we had loads of equipment to use to investigate and work out these problems.  Here are a few of the action shots from the day.

Graphic scores and musical storytelling

This afternoon Room 8 were very lucky to have Miss McGrath in to help with music.  The focus of the lesson was on sequencing and retelling a common story.  In small groups students designed a graphic score to help represent the sounds that they created with music.  This is shown below in the photo.

With the help of a conductor they then retold the story.  You can watch it in the video below.  Be sure to leave us some positive, thoughtful and helpful feedback.

Ako Hiko - student led toolkits

The second annual Ako Hiko student led toolkits were held today at Hay Park School.  12 eager students from our Year 5/6 syndicate joined representatives from the other 7 Ako Hiko schools for a day of fun, learning and collaboration.

Students had the chance to sign up to three different sessions last week to experience some of the amazing skills, hits, tips and tricks other students were willing to share. From Tinker-Cad to Makey-makeys to coding to storybird to google drawings there was something for everyone! Our students thoroughly enjoyed their new learning as well as connecting with other students in the cluster.
Ricky and Lily from Room 8 presented "Code studio in the class Room" in the first round of toolkits, then Safa from Room 8 and Izzy from Room 9 shared "Creating shared books and yearbooks using google drawings". The third and final session was a chance for all 12 participants to enjoy some more learning.  We had an amazing day and had the chance to learn lots of new things and about ourselves as well.  Thank you to Hay Park School, Mrs Archer and everybody else involved in the organisation of this day!

Sharing our Sharing

Week Four was an exciting and extremely busy week for Room 8!

 On Monday we had our normal cybersmart session with James, then joined up with the senior syndicate for the different aspects of production rehearsal in the afternoon.  Tuesday saw a selection of us out representing Waikowhai at tackle and ripper rugby.  On Wednesday we rotated our way around the hall in Gymnastics.  Some Year 6's investigated the Waikowhai Intermediate Day while some Year 5s helped out with the Spark Volunteer day by pitching in to beautify our school.  Finally on Friday we had students participate in our local community panel.

On top of these activities we managed to compile and share our learning at our assembly on Friday.  You will see the wonderful things we have working on embedded in our Google slide. Check out what we have been doing and please leave us a comment if you want to find out about anything we have shared or any of the activities above.  We love your feedback!

What is a quality blog comment?

Room 8 were extremely excited to see James again for our regular cybersmart session.  Today we were working on creating a quality blog comment within the Learn-Create-Share cycle.  This skill is extremely valuable as we continue to grow our online presence and digital footprints.

Our first task was to 'create' by contributing to the padlet embedded below.  James challenged us to describe all the things that we might see in a quality blog comment.

Created with Padlet

We then focused on "Learn". By reading examples of quality blog comments and viewing two relevant videos we were even more knowledge about commenting.  If you would like to find out more these resources are available on our cybersmart page in the first "smart relationships" section. With new knowledge on board we revisited and reflected upon our padlet contribution to make any changes. We say proudly that we had lots of great ideas in our first attempt and only had to make minor adjustments.

Then it was time to "Share", our favourite part.  We were challenged to use the quality blog post rubric to describe and share our learning. While we are getting better at sharing, the next learning step for many of us is to give more detail on our individual blogs so our audience can gain plenty of information, enough for them to leave us a quality comment. 

If you would like to find out more about Room 8's individual thoughts please check out our individual blogs.  We love positive, thoughtful and helpful comments and feedback and we are working hard to respond to you too!

Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu introduction, Round Two

This term we have joined a new Tuhi Mai, Tuhi Atu blog group. We are looking forward to using these blogs in our reading and writing programmes.  It means we will have a greater audience to share our learning and creations.   We are really working on positive, thoughtful and helpful comments and will use other class blogs to do this.

 You will find the links to our three buddy class blogs on the right hand side of our page in a blog list.

Below is a thinglink that has a small poster introducing each of the fabulous learners in Room 8. If you want to find out more about these awesome people, or connect with them, please check out their blogs at the side of the page too.  We love comments and feedback!